Download an Amazon order history report as CSV file

1

It's easy to view your recent orders on Amazon.com: mouse over your name near the top right corner of any page, and click Your Orders. From there, pick a time span (like "last 30 days" or "past 6 months"). When tax season comes around, especially if you're self-employed and purchasing work supplies and books from Amazon, being able to show orders for only a specific year makes things a lot easier. But, based on what you need, there are better options.

2

Most people don't know that Amazon lets you download custom reports as "CSV files". CSV stands for "comma-separated values": it's basically plain-text, which you can open in Notepad or SimpleText, for example, but its format is also recognized by Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers. Because it's plain-text, many third-party apps, like QuickBooks, also let you import those files!

3

Once logged into your Amazon account, go to this page: although this feature is primarily designed for businesses, it works for standard, personal Amazon accounts (you don't even need to be registered as an Amazon seller!)

4

First, select the type of report you'd like to download, like "Orders and shipments". Then, pick a start date and an end date: both are inclusive, meaning that the report will include those two dates, plus all the ones in between. Type a meaningful Report Name in the text box: if you run several reports, each of them will use that label as differentiator in the list. Double-check for typos, click on the Request Report button, and wait a minute or so.

5

Once Amazon has generated the report, it should automatically display it at the bottom. If hasn't done so after a minute or two, click on the Refresh List button to force-reload that listing. Then, click on the corresponding Download link, as shown in the previous screenshot. This screenshot shows you the standard Orders report, opened as a CSV file inside Microsoft Excel 2016. But CSV is so established that you can open it in, literally, any super-old version of Excel!